[K15 Session Review] @NOW: How We Embraced Performance Analytics

Heath Ramsey · ‎04-23-2015

In this session, Tara Romero (ServiceNow Senior Business Analyst) presented the journey that ServiceNow internally took with Performance Analytics to help drive insight into our own business. Yes, we truly do use our own products to support our business operations. And like you, we have similar problems and challenges that we are able to overcome with our solutions. Our learning process is also your learning process because what we discover is ultimately put back into the product.

Customer Problem

ServiceNow actually started with an official problem statement:

"We [ServiceNow] are not able to capture analytics in one place that will help us manage business practice and identify opportunities for improvement."

The state of the business required a team of people to manually gather data through the ServiceNow reporting engine and then export it to Excel for further processing. There are a number of issues with this:

Time Consuming: Just the process of running reports, exporting, and restructuring data is time consuming and tedious. People that are doing this could be doing so many more productive things.
Complex: Exporting to Excel is an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process itself. As you start to take data from more sources and build more worksheets in a workbook, the cell and sheet relationships become more complex and harder to untangle.
Error-prone: Anytime you have a manual process, you are inviting error. We strive to be perfect when we do data analysis, but the export and processing will never be 100% accurate over time. The data in the reports were not reliable.
Stale: By the time the data did make it into Excel, it was out of date. There was no way to get meaningful real-time data into a form that executives could consume.

But ServiceNow lived with this because Excel provided excellent ways to calculate and display data in a way that the earlier versions of the ServiceNow platform could not.

Enter Performance Analytics . . .

Customer Solution

The solution was simple: use an in-platform analytics tool to address the problems with Excel. ServiceNow had process structure and visibility of the data, but the insight to getting proactive was limited by the Excel data export. Fortunately, Performance Analytics had been integrated into the ServiceNow platform by this time. It really was just a matter of understanding the technology and applying it to the business problem. The data in the ServiceNow platform really is the single source of truth for data, and Performance Analytics provided the ability to capture the state of the data on a daily basis, which ultimately drives the trend information required by the business.

Performance Analytics allowed ServiceNow to have a "one-stop shop" for all data and reporting, which had the immediate benefits:

Eliminated Manual Process: The ETL issue went away because all of the data were collected in-platform. ServiceNow was able to use a single tool for reporting and analytics instead of multiple tools. This also resulted in a reduction in the number of hours required to create the reports. It is estimated that multiple man-weeks of effort were saved each month with the Performance Analytics solution.
Increased Data Confidence: The reporting and analytics data came directly from the single source of truth in the environment. There are no issues with errors in data or stale data.
Increased Data Consistency: All views into the data (list views, ad-hoc reports, trend analysis) were all in sync because they were coming from the same source of data.

How We Did It

Analytics represents a major change in the way organizations approach performance management. It is not enough to report on a process. You have to be able to measure "leading indicators" that will influence performance versus focusing on "lagging indicators", which are much easier to measure. ServiceNow approached the implementation of Performance Analytics in the following way:

Stage 1: Define Metrics

Rather than trying to do a complete analysis of all metrics the organization might need, the team focused on creating a single dashboard with the top 5 metrics that would likely drive performance improvement. The following criteria were used to determine the top 5:

Quick Wins: Where could we get the biggest impact?
Drive Change: What indicators would cause people to change behavior?
Eliminate Manual Process: How could we make the organization more efficient?
Performance Analytics Ready: Is it something that can be easily measured in Performance Analytics?

Once the top 5 metrics were defined, the technical work could begin.

Stage 2: Develop and Test

Developing and testing the indicators is where the majority of the work occurred. There were 3 basic areas needed to perform the development and testing:

Training: We picked the implementation and testing team, and then gave those individuals the training the needed to build and test the solution.
Development: We created the indicators and breakdowns, collected the data, and reviewed the visualizations to make sure they were what we wanted. Quite often we had to make tweaks and repeat the process to get to the visualization right.
Test: Once the dashboard with 5 indicators was ready, the dashboard was reviewed by the quality assurance teams to test and provide feedback.

Once a production-ready dashboard was created, we moved on to the last stage.

Stage 3: Publish

The most important part of the process is making sure the intended consumers are using the published data. It is one thing to create some great metrics and visualizations. If those great things aren't used . . . well, they're not that great. The data need to be actionable, and they are only actionable when they are viewed by the people that can take action.

To make sure the dashboard would be consumed, ServiceNow did the following things:

In-Person Demos: The dashboard was demoed in staff meetings to help people learn about the new dashboard and how to use it.
Interactive On-Line Demos: An interactive demo was made available on-demand so that staff could view it at any time.
Communications: Company-wide communications were sent to get staff to use the new dashboard.

Lessons Learned

For the initial implementation, we learned a few things right off the bat that have been incorporated into future development and releases:

Pick a Bigger Team to Start: Involve more than two people from the beginning. It drives involvement and mind share.
Develop More Than 1 Dashboard: You don't want to over-complicate your initial implementation, but plan on creating dashboards for more than 1 team/consumer or make sure there are executive dashboards in addition to process-specific dashboards.
Start the Marketing Campaign Early: Think about the marketing and how you are going to roll out the program while you are doing the development. Get people excited as you are developing instead of starting to generate interest only after the work has been completed.

Implementation Tips and Tricks

As you embark upon your journey with Performance Analytics, keep the following things in mind:

Integrate Performance Analytics Slowly Into Practice: You are changing how people work. It should be done slowly and in a way your users are comfortable with. Try to give them what they are used to seeing (similar looking charts, etc.). Try to provide a new data point that people didn't know they needed. Be open to feedback.
Hold Transfer of Information (TOI) Sessions: Demonstrate the tool. Teach them what is possible from the new solution. Let people try it out for themselves, and always be open to answering the questions they have.
Understand the Dashboard Purpose: Before creating a dashboard, make sure you understand your audience and what kind of dashboard will be valuable to them. Do you best to align what is being presented with the people consuming the dashboard.
Set Up Appropriate Rights: Be sure to leverage the Performance Analytics security roles to separate out the content consumers from the content creators.
Publish, Publish, Publish: Use the knowledge base to publish best practices for developers and consumers. Get everyone on the same page and give them material they can reference when they need it.

We hope that our experience with implementation Performance Analytics will help you with your journey to getting proactive. Feel free to comment/question on this article!